Pierre Huyghe

Untitled (Human Mask)

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by Mark Lewis

Type

Essays

Subject

One Film > Untitled (Human Mask)

Keywords

Pierre Huyghe, short films

Publishing date

2022

Publisher

Afterall Books

Collection

One Work

Language

English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Paperback • 96 pages
6 x 8 ¼ inches (15 x 21 cm)

ISBN

978-1-84638-213-0

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Book Presentation:
An examination of Pierre Huyghe's post-apocalyptic Untitled (Human Mask), which asks whether our human future may be one of remnants and mimicry.

Pierre Huyghe's 2014 film Untitled (Human Mask) combines images of a post-apocalyptic world (actual footage of deserted streets close to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster of March 2011) with a haunting scene of a monkey working in an empty restaurant wearing a human mask and a wig. She's a girl! The flat, emotionless almost automaton state of the mask and the artificial glossy hair topped even with a child's bow, suggests that she, the monkey, might be a character from Japanese Noh theatre. But there's no music. Instead Huyghe's film evinces the terrifying possibility that our own, human, future might just be one of remnants and mimicry; that the deserted streets of Fukushima and the monkey's recognizable, alienating chimeric performance is all that might survive us. Untitled (Human Mask) presents a pluperfect world with extinction the endgame for a civilization that cared little for the present, dreaming only of a future that inevitably and necessarily could not include it.

About the Author:
Mark Lewis is the series editor of the Afterall Books One Work series and professor of fine art at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, where he co-founded Afterall in 1998.

See the publisher website: Afterall Books

See Untitled (Human Mask) (Human Mask) on IMDB ...